Miroslav Holub’s (1982) Collision was first published in a collection of poems—Interferon, or on Theater (1982, United States; 1986, Czechoslovakia)—that, as the title suggests, takes immunology and theater as the central realms from which the poet draws his metaphors.
The action in this poem takes place in the moments before death occurs. The poem is a striking example of the way Holub interweaves the two domains (immunology and theater) through the whole collection and suggests how their interconnectedness can enrich human understanding of life. As David Young puts it, “[i]nterference on the cellular level corresponds to the presence of theater in our lives; both are attempts to arrest and mesmerize destructive forces, disease and history.”
Formally and stylistically, Collision features devices for which Holub was well known, such as litany, irony, the documentary narrative style, free-versification, technical and scientific expressions, and occasional unexpected line breaks that interrupt the otherwise straightforward narrative. Like several other poems in the collection, it employs a personal tone, something virtually nonexistent in Holub’s earlier poetry.
The poem reports the last thoughts of a dying victim of a car accident who lies bleeding on the ground. By means of the persona of the speaker, the poem also comments on the world beyond the collision. By using the two closely related perspectives, the poet further expands the already large themes presented in the poem, such as death, the meaning of life, human existence, and the representation of life (and death) in art.
The first line announces grimly and matter-of-factly, “I could have been dead by now.” As it turns out, while the first-person-singular vocalization is of the person who has been hit, it is not this speaker who becomes an omniscient observer of the scene. While the “I” is immediately displaced in the second line by the narrative voice saying, “he said to himself,” the personal perspective stays with the reader as a reminder of the actual person/character who is allowed to comment on his own tragedy. The “I” comes back in the last stanza to speak one more time before the narrator cuts him off with a straightforward and unemotional statement, “[a]nd then he died.”
The realistic-fantastic descriptions of the collision create a sense of unreality that can be experienced only by a person as close to death as the protagonist: “what was left / of the car was a funny pretzel / bitten by the dentures of a mad angel.” But the most memorable moments in the poem are the skillful metaphors of its speaker while observing the scene, because though he recognizes the inescapable fact of death and suffering, he also recognizes life’s will to endure.
These metaphors range from “the giant molecular cloud complexes” that deliver “embryonic stars” after the Big Bang, to “dried starfish . . . grasping the bottoms / of vanishing seas.” Therefore, despite the protagonist’s inevitable death and the severe reminder about the profound insignificance of a human life, the reader is left with a sense that human beings are endowed with life for a reason—even if the reason is just to witness such stark beauty.